A sip of hemlock by a rogue regime
By Linus Obogo
I had feared then and
sufficiently voiced my concern about then reckless and suicidal mission of a
bunch of political reprobates who congregated on APC plank. The manner of their
foray was reckless, adventurous and narcissistic. Almost four years down the
line, there’s now a clear demonstration of a woozy gang or band on a codeine
and tramadol diet, flushed down with hemlock, a poisoned chalice. They
were not hopeful and so couldn’t inspire hope either. They have been a letdown
and will ever be a letdown. They came like Nazareth and so did their fawners
reckon them. Yet they evinced an archetypal character from Sodom and Gomorrah.
In their Nazarethan pretense, they courted and bedded Delilah until their
self-professed moral gloss took a vanishing flight. Having found themselves in
the twilight and inescapably helmed in, a sip of hemlock is all that’s now good
enough to crumble the empire they have failed woefully to preside over. That’s
where we have found ourselves. Pull down the pillars and collapse the
roof.
In the last three weeks, there’s been a knee-jerk approach to
self-assertion, self-validation and self-perpetuation by a rogue and
blighted leadership bent on rerouting our sociopolitical trajectory. From a
lying and shifty Vice president to an absent minded, nepotistic and ethnically
bigoted President, they all seem to have drunk power to a point of stupor and
inebriation. No doubt, what we currently have confronting us is “either we
have the country or we sink it.”
Now, no one to occupy Nigeria for Nigerians as they did in the days of
Jonathan.
In their journey to this avoidable perdition, the rule books are inexorably
being changed.
But where are Falanas, the Soyinkas? No more gadflies.
For nearly four years now, we have been tragically plagued by discrepancies,
inequalities inconsistencies and inexactitude in the governance architecture of
the country. Selective justice and near injustice in a regime whose 2-i-c lays
a dubious professorial claim to law but is pathetically blind to an aberrant
abuse of the finest ingredients of justice. A regime whose anti-corruption
adviser wears a double face in the interpretation of law, Justice and
equity.
Nigeria is on a cliffhanger. The citizenry is on tenterhooks. Our elasticity is
on test. How long we can endure this stretch, the days ahead will tell as we
are progressively losing our common heritage, Nigeria to the goons and the
dogs. How many voices are ready to join with Obasanjo’s to claw back our
already broken country? Else, before long, we will kiss our wobbling democracy
its final good night and sing Nigeria its nunc
dimittis. We are on a slide to anarchy. Our judiciary is on a stranglehold.
Our country has been kidnapped, held hostage by a coterie of vicious bandit to
whom our stumbling absentee president is an inveterate pawn.
- Obogo, Deputy Chief Press Secretary to Governor Ben Ayade, wrote from Calabar, Cross River State.